Arya Walsh Wanderer FIN

From as far back as I can remember there was something wrong with the life I was living, but being so young and naïve I didn't know what it was. I felt out of place in the world, I felt like people were staring at me, their eyes boring into me like a thousand needles, but I knew it wasn't true. It was my own fears and insecurities making me feel like this, it was the fact that I didn't feel comfortable with who I was or how I looked. I would spend hours in my room, my little child brain going through a thousand different scenarios of why I would feel this way. Of course most of them were complete nonsense, but there was one thought that hit me as I looked at my naked frame in a large mirror that stood in the corner of my room. This wasn't my body, who I was looking at in the mirror wasn't me, it was some terrible façade.

Naturally I took it up with my parents though, after all they only wanted my happiness in this world, and I had no reason to be unhappy because they gave me absolutely everything. Life in the Capitol was like that, whatever we wanted we got, so why should this situation be any different. Once I sat down with them though I knew I was in for a fight, I was only six years old, but I knew what it was that I wanted. It's not every day that you have to sit down with your parents and tell them your body is foreign to you. Granted the physical differences between me and every other girl were minimal at this point, but I knew what was coming...I knew what awaited me as I grew older and I didn't want it. So I sat my six year old self down with my mom and dad and I put it to them as bluntly as I could. "Mom...Dad...I'm a girl", I still remember the looks they gave me, anger from my Dad and sorrow from my Mom, but they didn't say no. It was almost like they had known it to begin with, and they were expecting it from me. I asked them to call me by a new name, becoming Arya instead of Argo, my birth name, and I began to dress as I felt.

Though this itself didn't stop my feelings of insecurity it did help, it made me feel more free, like I was actually showing myself to people, they weren't seeing something I wasn't. On the other hand I still had something else looming over me, the impending time that would change me, creating an almost irreversible pattern of growth in me. I would spend long nights in my room staring at my reflection, tears running down my smooth cheeks, as I tried to picture the changes that would happen to me. I would panic as I worried over the growth of my adam's apple or whether I would find a hair on my face that I didn't feel belonged. One night my Mom caught me trying to...alter...myself, and I think that was when she finally began to take it seriously. She went to my Dad and talked to him, resulting in a visit to the best doctors the Capitol could offer, all of them recommending the same thing...blockers. In other words I didn't have to fear all those changes to my body, I was free of another fear, free to be myself again. I was only ten at the time, but I knew exactly what I wanted.

It was hard being the girl that people knew as a boy before. People weren't very understanding of me, they weren't understanding of what my life was before and how much happier I am now. I could hear their whispers "wasn't that the son of the Walsh's before?" or "He'll never be able to fit in with us, we know what he was before". It was hurtful that they wouldn't accept me, wasn't this supposed to be my home too, wasn't I supposed to be able to live here and be happy with who I was? It wasn't that I didn't look the part, it was that they didn't have enough decency in them to look past what I was before. My hair and my body were right, my smoky grey eyes didn't have any loss of feeling in them, I was still a human, and I still deserved to be treated like one. It seemed like too much to ask though, too much to believe that my own people, my own family would accept me. I could see it in their eyes too, the looks of disappointment, so thinly veiled as they looked at me.

Life for me should have gotten better, I should have been able to get through things easily, but that wasn't to be the case. Everyone in the Capitol was rather strange, but even for people like me it wasn't widely accepted, I was even more strange than everyone else, at least by their standards. I think it was then that I decided that something wasn't right, we had everything in the world, and we professed to be a greater more accepting people, but they weren't very accepting of me. I knew that I was doing what I needed to though, and as things went along, as I began to finally change, people around me seemed to forget. I didn't forget though, I couldn't forget how they looked at me and stared as if I was something was wrong with me, as if I was some sort of freak. It all caught up to me though, my looks were what I wanted, and they couldn't stare at me anymore. The Capitol was at least good for one thing, they had made me into the girl I always was, the girl I was always meant to be.

My friends though, what few I had, they were accepting of me. Not that they had any reason not to be, to them I had always been the little girl who just wouldn't shut up. I was always talking, always trying to invent a world that wasn't the steel jungle I lived in right now. Part of me wanted to see what else the world had to offer, what the districts had to show. I wanted to see how everyone else lived, I wanted to see if all the stories we were told about the districts were true. Were they filled with the monsters that we were told about in the stories, were all of them so brutal that they would kill for food or water? Part of me doubted it, after all District 1 was said to be one of the wealthiest, the only thing they would kill over would be a spot in the Games. We had seen how ferocious they all were, we...no, I had seen it first hand when I watched the Games.

I got off point though, my friends, they supported me, and as thoughts of leaving the Capitol began to form in my head...well it was my friends that I didn't want to leave. I had become everything that before now I had only dreamed of, thanks to the ingenuity of the Capitol I had become a girl. I had the slim figure, my hair was grown out, I had boobs, I had an ass, it was something that before now I had only dreamed of. I was 15 when it was all over, 15 when I completed my transition. I never had to worry about being uncomfortable with who I was, I never felt more free than I did now, at least from a physical stand point. Now though I had another fear, something else that was nagging at the back of my mind. I had learned some important things through this process, one of the most important being that the Capitol wasn't all that I thought it was. I needed to find out for myself, I needed to figure out what Panem was really like. I knew it would be hard, but like before I was resolved to do this, I had to know the truth.

Was I being selfish though, leaving like I was planning to? Was I being selfish by trying to run away from all this just for curiosity? I like to think I was being a good person, trying to save the districts, or at least find out the truth about them. I doubt there would be anything I could do as an individual, but it would be a learning experience for me. I would spend long nights staring out across the expanse that was the Capitol, trying to understand everything, trying to figure out what this...what life meant. I had gone through so many trials to reach where I was now. A family that didn't truly accept me, people who stared at me like I was a freak, stories of savages out in the districts that would kill you before trying to help you. Part of me believed the stories, but another part of me wanted to think that maybe...while there was some truth to the stories...that they were driven by need or fear.

I was sixteen years old when I ran away, a mere sixteen years old when I broke out of my own house and escaped the Capitol. Not that I was prepared for what the world had to offer, in fact I found out that there was after all some truth to what they said about the districts. They were a bloodthirsty group, they were rude and uncontrollable...yet there was a part of them that I loved, something about them that I wanted to learn from, that I wanted to be. At least there was one thing that I had going for me here, they didn't know who I was before, so I could be anyone that I wanted, and be anything that I wanted. It was a new beginning and yet a struggle for me because while I could be anything that I wanted, I had to take care of myself. I wasn't very good at that either considering the life style I was brought up in before. I couldn't call any of the districts my home either, at least not for now, they would notice if someone new settled in and decided to call it home. No, for now I had to blend in and do what I had to in order to survive...or at least learn how to survive.

It's not like other people out in the wilderness would try and find people, they ran away for a reason. I needed to learn how to do things all over again, which sort of made me feel like a baby again. It was like learning how to walk all over again, the hunting, cooking, cleaning myself, it was all foreign to me, and yet it was something that I enjoyed. Keeping my blonde hair clean and my face perfect or washing my clothes, most of which had come from the districts now, it was something that I enjoyed. I liked to survive like I was, relying only on myself and being able to be myself. I loved it and for the first time I could really love myself. It wasn't the artificial me that was raised in the Capitol, it was the me that was grown from necessity, from a need to survive. I think that's what really made me able to love myself.